In October 2025, a 26-year-old ex-VC who spent years analyzing Marvel release dates on Tumblr raised $1.1 million to build a search engine for fandoms. Within weeks of soft launch, her product—Lore—logged 24,000 searches across 200 hours of engagement. Village Global and Precursor Ventures bet she's onto something: people will pay for tools that help them go deeper, not broader.
That same month, Books By People launched certification for human-written literature, the Authors Guild rolled out "Human Authored" stamps, and StockX crossed 60 million lifetime trades with 20 million buyers hunting authenticated sneakers. The pattern isn't subtle. When information floods, provenance becomes the product.
Here's the play: build narrative infrastructure where lore actually matters—crypto, YC alumni networks, sneaker provenance, chef migrations—and charge the people who monetize context for living. The wedge is crypto. The moat is proprietary disambiguation. The exit is owning the canon layer for any domain where "who did what when" determines who wins.
The Signal Stack
Fandom search just got funded at scale. Lore's thesis is simple: traditional search flattens context, and wikis bury it. Obsessives want zoomable graphs—Entity A influenced Entity B, which forked into C during Event X—with time-scoped confidence scores. They raised $1.1M to prove people will use this daily, not as novelty.
Crypto already operates like a fandom. Dune Analytics serves crypto's top firms with paid tiers for private queries, data exports, and API access. Their credits-based model starts around $75/month and scales with usage. But Dune gives you data, not narrative. It tells you wallet X moved $2M; it doesn't tell you wallet X belongs to Founder Y, who left Project Z three weeks after Exploit A, and here are the five threads that shaped sentiment.
YC is a lore factory at $800B+ scale. Y Combinator has funded 5,000+ companies with a combined valuation exceeding $800 billion. That's 9,000+ founders whose pivots, acqui-hires, and diaspora create a permanent graph of "who knew what when." VCs, journalists, and scouts spend hours stitching LinkedIn + Crunchbase + rumor threads to answer "Did Founder X work with Founder Y before raising from Z?" That query should cost $18/month, not three hours.
Sneakers are $200B of authenticated lore. StockX hit 60 million trades and 20 million buyers in 2024, processing billions in authenticated resale. Why? Because provenance matters. A Travis Scott collab isn't just a shoe; it's a collaboration tree, a release timeline, a resale history. StockX verifies authenticity; nobody verifies context. Build the narrative layer, and you own the intelligence premium.
Authenticity infrastructure is going mainstream. Books By People launched in October 2025 to certify human authorship for publishers. The Authors Guild offers "Human Authored" stamps to 15,000 members with a searchable public registry. When fake floods the zone, people pay for verified real. That same dynamic applies to narratives: when LLM-generated summaries are free, human-curated, citation-backed context graphs become the luxury good.
What You're Building (Crypto First, Then Expand)
A time-aware narrative graph that turns chaotic public data into queryable, citeable lore.
Core product:
Vault-only access.
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